My abridged teaching statement, some favorite course comments, and teaching history can be found here. For teaching history, go the bottom of this page.
Please email me at paschaljoshua@gmail.com if you want copies of my longer statements, syllabi, or course evaluations!
Teaching Statement
My approach to teaching is to foster an environment in which students can express their beliefs and reflect on their own thinking. I consider this to be what it means to do philosophy. My goal as an educator is not just to get students to be able to recall what various figures say about given topics but, instead, to be able to grapple with those hard questions themselves. Philosophy should aim to enable students to engage the deep questions of what they value and how they seek to live. Navigating disputes, especially abstract ones, only comes with sincere practice and effort.
I believe philosophy is at its best when it is honest and sincere. I find this is something professional philosophers end up taking for granted sometimes: we end up becoming very direct about what we believe, especially with one another. This is not so obvious for the vast majority of students—a few times a semester I will have a student explicitly say something to me along the lines of “I’ve never had a class that invited me to think for myself like this.” Every time a student says something like that, I am reminded of why I fell in love with philosophy in the first place.
Selected Comments
“I loved that [he] came in everyday and asked the class how everyone was doing. [He] never called anyone out or made anyone feel uncomfortable. I really enjoyed [his] class even though philosophy wasn’t really my cup of tea. Thank you for allowing us to express our thoughts and feelings without making comments, because you don’t see a lot of professors caring for their students in that way.”
“It was very clear that he was passionate about what he was teaching. As a student, this made it a lot easier to engage with the material. He was also very good at relating the material to our normal lives. Sometimes philosophy papers can become very detached from our normal way of thinking and from what we have seen before. There were good examples and explanations to help make philosophy more manageable and make it clear what the big points of different philosophies were.”
“Didn’t give us the answer, but helped us get there through discussion. Very willing to hear different opinions.”
“The classes were pretty awesome, one of the more fun classes I’ve taken this semester.”
“He was animated and clearly very passionate about philosophy as a whole which definitely encouraged active discussion. He was also very understanding and flexible with students if they needed extra time to complete something of had something going on in their personal lives.”
“[He] had a positive energy and inspired students to perform their best. While the course material may have been difficult to understand, he provided a great deal of time for questions and provided recounts of readings that stuck to the core principals of each writing.”
“The atmosphere for participation was impressive. The course content was accessible either through the use of handouts of the dedicated time taken each meeting for questions. This gave the opportunity for clarification and reiteration that is key for success in philosophy classes. The variety of the material from traditional to more contemporary perspectives and accounts meant that there was little room to not be interested by at least a few of the topics, if not all.”
Teaching History
Instructor of Record (Indiana University):
Philosophy and the Environment (Spring 2024, Fall 2023)
Environmentalism and Extremes (Spring 2023)
Business & Morality (Fall 2022)
Assistant, Grading and Discussion (Indiana University):
Introduction to Ethics (Spring 2022, Tarasenko-Struc)
Biomedical Ethics* (Fall 2021, Robison, *grading only)
Environmental Ethics (Spring 2021, Adams)
Introduction to Ethics (Fall 2020, O’Connor)
Introduction to Philosophy (Spring 2020, Leite)
Introduction to Ethics (Fall 2019, Robison)
Joshua Paschal 